Peter's Blog - Nodes for flickr

Bye Bye Flickr

I haven't used my flickr account for ages, since they made it mandatory to have a Yahoo ID to log in. I have no desire to be a yahoo customer, the company has tried too many times to foist me off with the yahoo toolbar. They are too pushy for my tastes. I wanted to close the flickr account but to do that I had to log in with a Yahoo ID (Catch 22) so it was a job I kept putting off.

I decided to bite the bullet and do it. So that yahoo wouldn't be able to spam me I created a mail account with http://mailexpire.com and used that to create a yahoo ID. mailexpire gave me a transient email address that will expire in a few hours time. All email sent to this address is forwarded to my own address. It took me three tries to get the illegible yahoo captcha right and I was given the usual wilkinsonpeter321 kind of ugly yahoo loser email address. I used it to delete the flickr account and then I deleted the yahoo ID which was barely ten minutes old.

Time will tell whether mailexpire start sending me spam...

I noticed this on the Yahoo sign-up site:

NOTICE: We collect personal information on this site.

I'm not sure if this is a 'may contain nuts' kind of warning for a sign-up page that asks me for my name or if it means something more sinister.

Online Backup

Researching online backup solutions: really must backup family photos properly. Options so far:

mozy: 2G free or $4.95 a month unlimited. Automated backup and offers file versioning for a month which would be handy. Files accessable from web.

carbonite: a different shade of mozy, horses for courses. Trial account but no long term free account.

xdrive: 5G free which is enough. Creates a virtual drive which you copy files to however you like or run their backup software. Web based access to files from anywhere, file sharing, lots of nice features. What puts me off? It's owned by AOL

flickr: could just upload multiple G of photos to flickr but since they decided to force me to get a yahoo account I haven't been using flickr (yahoo or AOL, I don't want the hassle). Also the upload wouldn't be as totally automatic as mozy or carbonite.

site5: I could cobble something together on my site5 hosting account: I have about 14G free and ssh access so I should be able to do something but it will be a lashup that I would have to nurse along.

Being a dedicated backup solutions, Mozy or Carbonite would almost force me to do backups and do them well. With anything that looked like another hard disk I would end up with yet another disorganised mess. Less flexibility than xdrive could be a good thing. And by avoiding AOL and yahoo I stick it to "the man".

flickr

flickr is a trendy place to publish photos on the web. My flickr photos are here.

Drupal Flickr Block

I saw in my logs that someone was searching on my site on how to create a Drupal block for flickr. It's easy:

On your flickr account, create a badge
Copy the badge code
in Drupal, create a block of type 'php' and paste the flickr code into it.

This will show selected or random photos in a selection of sizes. It works very nicely.

I chose to centre the pictures in the block by surrounding the code in a centred div:

<div style="text-align: center">
[flick code]
</div>

More playing with Flickr

Played some more with Flickr and I am rather impressed with it. I have tried two or three photo upload sites and this is by far the best. I have tried:

Epson online site. Neglected this for months now.
Drupal image module, i.e. this.
Photobox private archive. This is where I get my prints done and they give me 50M more space with every order. I'm up to 250M. My photo archive on my laptop is 1G.

Compared with the above Flickr offers a lot more features and, although it has adverts it is not blatantly trying to sell prints. This is important to me if I want to let friends or relatives look around. It just seems rude for each picture to have price tags on it.

Flickr highlights:

Drag-and-drop windows upload utility. I can drag photo's from Paintshop Photo Album onto this and upload them, easy, cool. Ease of uploading is important: PPA displays the images clearly and I drag them to upload them. Much better than fiddling with the file open dialog box.
Organizr utility, an online version of Paintshop pro Photo Album. This is java or flash or something and is quite well done, more like a windows app than a web app.
Calender organisation.
Post from email, including mobile phone.
Anyone in the world can see my pictures and that is cool.

Flickr is free up to 10Mbytes per month and only displays your last 100 pictures. Upgrade to 1G/month and limitless pictures is $40 a year.

I do recommend Photobox for prints: they come in a day or two and the quality is superb: they make 'photo-quality' inkjet photos look very poor.

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Flickr

Subscribed to flickr, todays 5 minute wonder. Added new block on the right with random baby picture.

I tried to subscribe to Flickr yesterday but they were having severe problems, I got a fatal error when I tried to subscribe and they seemed to be having bad loading problems. They seem to be victims of their success. If flickr delays my page loads then the photo goes.

I take photos every day with the Canon Powershot S1 IS, I've learnt how to get it to autofocus most of the time and the new Uniross 2000mA/h batteries have been in it a week now without a recharge, no problems there, well worth £8.

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